


The Regenerators

by itsyaboydave



Category: Original - Fandom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 01:33:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12901131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsyaboydave/pseuds/itsyaboydave
Summary: in a world where some people are born who arent people, who stew with genetic abilities to grow themselves and other, who are opressed without reason. in a world where im drunk and will have forgotten i posted this chapter HHHHhh :))





	The Regenerators

They had been there one day, he reasoned, though not having a window to measure time by the rise and fall of the sun didn’t help that assumption. Twenty four hours of shivering and waiting. They barely spoke and tried to save energy and warmth. Waiting. It was a waiting game. A torture tactic. Let your prisoners stew for a while. Let them think they are isolated and alone and unimportant.  
When the door finally did open and the harsh shitty lights flickered on, they shook one another awake and looked up at a small, skinny man in a sharp and very clean dark suit. He had a balding, sickly head of hair, and a smarmy look in his ratty little eyes. The Captain felt nearly embarrassed to be looked down on by someone like him. Closely following the overly clean man shambled a monstrous hulk of a person. Gnarled tusks and one drifting eye set in a leathery sweaty face, distorted and ballooning grotesquely. He was taller than the cell ceiling and crouched slightly to fit, his giant knuckles wrapped around his heavy belt lined with a creative array of sharp blood stained tools. None of those tools came from any one profession.  
The too-clean man clicked his heels and stood neatly before the huddled group. “You all look rather grouchy.”  
“You look like a douchebag,” the Captain bit back immediately.  
“Hmm, is it the jacket?” he looked down at himself. “My wife bought it. Not sure if it agrees with me.”  
“I think it’s more of a general personality thing actually.”  
“Hmm.” He looked down his nose at him. His eyes were a piercing watery grey. “Where is the oracle?” he started abruptly.  
“What oracle.”  
The man sighed. “Please let us not play this game.”  
“I have no idea what you are referring too.”  
“Really? I think you do.”  
“Oh ok I’ll tell you.” The man blinked in surprise. The Captain leaned forward and the man followed expectantly. “It’s up your tight little ass.”  
The man let loose a breath of air he had been holding and his face looked resigned all of a sudden. Disappointed almost. “Hmm.” The Captain was going to kill him if he made that fucking noise again. “Ok…” he looked suddenly bored, “take their Regenerator,” he clicked his fingers and the big man stomped forward.  
“What.” The Captain paled, as the bigger man reached over the group with ease and plucked the Regenerator up with a big meaty hand around their neck. Before anyone could move to intercept, before the Regenerator even had time to react beyond deep terror appearing on their face, the chains were savagely ripped from their wrists with two loud cracks, and tucked under the giant man’s arm, turning to clump out the room.  
“The big man here is going to work on your friend! How exciting.”  
“NO! NO, WAIT-“  
“You want to start talking about the oracle yet, Captain?” the smarmy, greasy, slimy smile that was plastered all over the clean man’s face made the Captain’s mouth snap shut. “No? Pity.” He made to leave but paused and looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, and don’t worry. We aren’t taking your little friend very far. They’ll be right next door.” He paused with his hand resting on the light switch. “You’ll hear every scream.”  
The door slammed and the lights flickered back off again. No one spoke. The Captain stared down at his hands.  
Their plan was so cruel. Their plan was so wrong. It was taking worse and worse turns.  
They sat in the dark, waiting, shackles clinking, dust gently billowing from their breaths. The silence was something solid you could cut through. It grew louder every second.  
The brittle sounds of an aged record haltingly scratched into play and they all jumped. It wasn’t a scream that cut through the song first. It was a noise that sounded involuntary, like someone was trying to hold back the sound. The noises gradually built up to panicked half-words, sweeping like a wave to unrelenting screaming. Even through the heavy door they were crystal clear.  
And it was honestly worse listening to it like that. The screams were guttural, animal. They would rise and fall, stutter down to begging “please, pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease pleasePLEASEPLEASENOOOOoNONOOOO-“ Silence. Pause. More screaming. At one point they heard sickly mutters as the men marvelled together at ‘the rate at which the flesh regenerated’. The Captain wanted to throw up. The group couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, opting to glare at the grimy dripping walls.  
The record ended and the screaming continued. Someone clanked something metal onto a bench, and there were whimpers while the record was switched over. The same song kept playing.  
The begging was what got to the Captain.  
The silence was what got to the rest. It was sudden. Ended the screams with a short sharp slam to the face, after nine turns of the record, the same voiceless terrible song echoing into them.  
The door slammed open and that wretched horrible man stood there, covered in blood. The reek of gore filled the chamber, and he held up something in his hands, something gushing blood and still beating.  
He opened his mouth and revealed his stained tombstone teeth. “Be my Valentine?” he croaked, and laughed, slapping his knees, and letting the heart roll towards them. It rested in the straw at the Captain’s feet. He looked down at it and then back up, gaze unwavering, begging his voice not to waver.  
“They will grow it back.”  
“And I,” said the man triumphantly, ”will cut it back out. Give them some tiiiime to get betterrr. And then…. We play the record again!” he backed out giggling.  
“Captain-“  
“We follow the plan.”  
“But-“  
“We follow. The plan.”  
“Alright  
 

* * *

It took days. The butcher worked all day letting the police shudder in their cell, but as night fell he fed them and left with a cheery ‘goodniiiight! See if someone talks tomorrrooww!’ in his sickening sing song voice. In the darkness they communicated to the Regenerator through the door. Nothing serious, just encouragements, pointless little notions of how much their sacrifice and silence was saving the country. On the first night the Regenerator talked back. But the second night it was only silence that greeted them. It was worrying.  
It was nearly dark on the third night when the door swung open and the man stood there, a little grin on his face. “It ain’t growing no more,” he said. “Your lil friend is letting themselves diiiiiieee!”  
He strolled over to them. “you wanna talk to em’?” he said standing above them all. “Make em grow again? Let me play again?”  
“Oh please,” said the Captain dryly. “Allow me.”  
The big man laughed, pulling out the key from his pocket, unlocking the Captain’s shackles, allowing him to stand.  
   
He threw up when he saw them, and it dribbled toward a drain already congealed with blood and tissue. Their face had been peeled back like a flower opening, heavy medical clamps keeping the flesh apart. There were no teeth in the lipless mouth, nor eyes in the lidless sockets. The jaw had been removed and the tongue shredded in long lines, hanging listlessly. Nails were protruding from each knuckle, and the wrists had been nailed to the chair rather than shackled. The legs were gone, as were the fingernails. There was no skin from the shoulders to the stomach. The breastbone had been broken and removed and the ribs had been snapped and bent, the silent lungs and still heart exposed to the air. Organs pooled and drooped over the sides of the chair, joining piles of old decaying flesh on the floor. Dried blood coated everything, the floor, the chair’s wrecked vinyl, what was left of the young soldier’s skin. The stench…  
The big man moved around the Captain. “Bit of a lost cauuuuuse, if you ask me,” he said, picking up a tall jar filled with teeth and two gory eyeballs. “Not much left to saaalvaaage.”  
“Nothing is truly lost,” the Captain wiped his mouth and approached the bench, looking down into the cavity of a face.  
“Well it aint breathin’ no moooore.” Hearing a clink, the Captain looked up and saw the butcher with his back turned, arranging five more jars, each with their array of teeth, and topped with a grisly garnish of two eyeballs.  
When the Captain sees red, there isn’t much anyone can do to stop him. You get out of his way, or you lay down and take it. It was a rule of thumb to try not to piss him off.  
The butcher apparently didn’t get the memo.  
While he lay bleeding out of his fat neck on the floor, the Captain circled the bench the Regenerator lay upon. He slipped off his glove and placed his professional hands over the exposed heart and massaged it once, twice, three times, before it thudded and the entire body convulsed. Blood sputtered up from the empty throat and across his face. The lungs inflated. Thud… thud.  
Lowering his face down near the holes he assumed used to be ears, he whispered savagely.  
“This is your Captain speaking, you little shit. You start regenerating right this second or you’re fired.”  
Thud. Nothing. It was a moving corpse. What a joke of a threat.  
The Captain sighed. “I know this was hard. The hardest thing you might ever have to go through. But I am not going to let you die. The world needs you too much. Right now you are facing the prospect of living forever in this state, I will never leave your side, and refuse to let your suffering end. Or you regenerate yourself. Live again. Save lives.”  
Thud. Nothing.  
“Kid please. If you can’t do this for yourself, do it for me, for your team, for your family.”  
Thud… Thud… Thud thud….  
“Good.” The Captain stood up and watched the tongue knit itself back together, the nails push out from deep in the knuckles and drop to the floor. The hands wrenched free, reached sideways and scrabbled for a scalpel from the workbench, and the Captain seized the wrist holding it. “What do you think you’re doing with that?”  
Teeth welled in the newly formed jaw like pearls and a wet, choked, drowned voice rattled out of the recovering throat. “r-re-move… the dead…parts…”  
Their other hand took the Captain’s from the wrist wielding the scalpel and they reached up and started hacking at the huge slops of flesh that was peeled off the blood red bone, as new, baby-soft skin started to develop on the skeleton.  
“Oh,” muttered the Captain. He took the crushed ribs and tried to as gently as possible snap them off completely. The Regenerator didn’t react to each snap, still sawing at their own flesh. Once the ribs were out of the way of the new ones extending like deer antlers, followed by a wave of new tissue. He removed the odd bits of debris the butcher had impaled through what was left of the legs, and the flesh on the upper arms, before taking the scalpel and quickly and cleanly slicing through the dead flesh. The face was nearly fully formed, at least in comparison to being bare bone. Despite the lack of eyes, lids, lips or ears. The Captain felt bile rise up his throat as he stared at them in the chair, breathing and growing.  
This was his fault.  
“I’ll fetch the others, then we’ll go.” Without waiting for an answer he tore his eyes away. Leaving them to it, the Captain wrestled the key out of the dead man on the floor’s pocket and marched back to the cell.

He opened the door and saw what the butcher had seen every time he opened that door. Six little crows bundled up on themselves to escape the cold.  
"Captain?"  
“What happened?!"  
“The butcher is dead, the regenerator is fine. We’re finishing the mission.” They complied without question with tired little nods of their heads. Captain unlocked their restraints and they all filed out of the cell, but stopped short just outside.  
“Why are we all waiting,” he snarled barging through them, but he himself stopped when he saw what the Regenerator was doing.  
“They don’t look completely fine,” snarled Macauley. Still without the use of their half-formed legs, they were straddling the butcher who lay very dead on the floor, using both hands to hack again and again and again into the body with the bloodied scalpel.  
“Regenerator,” said Captain. They didn’t seem to hear.  
“Regenerator, can you hear me,” he started to approach. They didn’t stop the erratic, frenzied stabs, and he started to hear the savage huffing and puffing of the enormous effort they were putting into each stab. As he came closer he almost vomited again when he saw what they had done to the face.  
“Please stop,” he whispered, reached a hand to their shoulder, ever so gently. As soon as he came in contact, they froze, their huge breaths heaving their body, arms up in the air, poised for another hack. “We have to finish the mission.”  
“…the… mission.”  
“Yes.”  
“I-don’t…” They let their arms drop and the scalpel rolled away. Their breathing slowed. The air in the room felt dangerous as the rest of the team waited with baited breath. And then their shoulders stiffened and they slipped out from under Captain’s hand and off of the butcher’s butchered body. Everyone could suddenly see the looseness of the eyelids where their eyeballs should be, not to mention the legs missing from the shin down.  
The Regenerator shook their head violently and when they stopped ears had formed. They sat panting heavily, blind and shaking. The squad watched them, frozen. “I’ll need some clothes,” they said finally, voice strong, leaning their head back against the wall, and propping their leg-stubs up on the body. “And legs.”  
“We can carry you until you regrow them,” the Captain’s tone had set into a decisive one. He stood and turned to the rest of the team. They looked tired, and spooked, but ready for action all the same. “Find some clothes and food. Try not to set off any alarms. Don’t open locked doors, don’t approach other people, and do not release other prisoners. Three minutes.” They nodded and dispersed with barely a whisper or murmur, leaving Captain to browse the current room. There wasn’t much, shelves of jars filled with dissected body parts, animals, foetuses of varying species, arrays of knives and strange torture devices that looked like they hadn’t been cleaned for decades, and one very old, very dead pot plant.  
The three minutes stretched on and on. At one point he thought he could even hear the Regenerator’s bones growing. He opened his mouth to say something but they spoke first.  
“What day is it?”  
“What day?”  
“Yeah. Kinda hard to keep track, what with all the,” they whirled their hand around absentmindedly in the air, “torture and stuff.”  
He turned slowly. “It’s Saturday.”  
They dropped their hand and it slapped wetly to the floor. “Three days. Ought to get a damn trophy or something.”  
Another stretch of silence, and the Regenerator started patting out sounds with their hands on the wet floor and the Captain stared at them until he opened his mouth. “Your eyes aren’t regrowing.”  
They faced him, “Excuse me for not wanting to look at your ugly mug ever again,” getting a short huff of annoyance from the Captain.  
“Do you have a… limit? Of how many times you can regrow a body part?”  
They shook their head. “No. Instincts are just taking a while to kick in. It’s ok.”  
“Instincts…”  
“Yea. Well every time I regrew them they were just scooped right back out, or I had to watch my ribs gets peeled out of my body. It’s kind of hard to believe that if I regrow them then I won’t just wake up and be back in the chair.“  
“….I’m sorry.”  
“Yeah me too. Asshole.”  
They sat in silence rich with tension, interrupted by the faint patter of the squads’ feet as they returned. They browsed through their collective spoils until they found the more suitable and warmer set of clothes, eating as they went. Dillon helped the still legless Regenerator into them, being as gentle as he dared until they gave a short bark of a laugh. “Im not going to break Dillon, you pussy, come on.” The tension in the air eased a little as everyone gave a tired chuckle. The Regenerator put their arms up and Macaulay moved to let them slip over his neck and lifted them like a child. The regenerator was light enough that Macaulay could still free one arm if he needed to defend himself, but the squad wordlessly took up position around the pair as they exited the prison facility and into the cold night air. They took a collective breath, realising just how stuffy it had been the past few days, stretching their tired aching muscles, and appreciating just how long since they all had had a bath.  
The gentle rhythm of Macaulay’s stride almost lulled them to sleep and they let themselves a moment of peace. Listened to his heart beat and smelt his not-torturer smell, indulged in the relief their head was allowing them to have. They tried to hide a sigh but it came anyway and Macaulay gave them a little reassuring squeeze. Everything was going to be fine. You know, if they all survived. The Regenerator was going to be an awful lot pissed off if they all died now.  
They walked for nearly thirty minutes with barely a word, scuttling and ducking and doubling back. The compound was huge. Stupidly huge, and complicated, especially for a military compound. They passed both ancient and new buildings scattered around each other with no rhyme or reason. Dozens of enormous laboratories in various states of disrepair, one with vines the size of car bodies wrapped around its face. Occasionally they would pass a group of patrolling soldiers or a harried looking lab worker and they would sink into the shadows. Eventually they had navigated close enough to the castle that the defences got hard to pass by unnoticed. They paused to sit, rest, regroup, and passive-aggressively whisper.  
Candice stretched her arms behind her head. “Ok, so. There’s no way around. We exhausted every other possibility.”  
“We need to get the Oracle to that tower.”  
“That’s nice, Captain, thank you for your helpful input. Perhaps you’d like to take out the map and draw on it with crayons?” The Captain stared at her, mouth slightly agape. “The only way is through.”  
“So lets go.”  
“Macaulay, be a lamb and pop your head out the side of the wall there and tell us what you see.”  
Macaulay did as he was asked, setting aside the long blade he had resting in his lap and lazily leaning around the corner. There was a collection of bangs and Macaulay leaned back towards the group, sporting several new bloody holes in his shoulder. “Two actively manned Gatling guns mounted on the back of jeeps which are just crawling with soldiers, approximately one hundred yards away,” he said calmly, gently leaning into the Regenerator’s hands as they reached out to heal him. He stifled a groan and continued. “Thirty by my count. All armed. The path towards them is tapered, funnelling us towards them. Bare minimum cover. A blockade is in front of the jeeps. Not even a truck could smash through that shit. They’ve set this up very well. Awesome defences honestly.”  
“Macaulay, please don’t compliment the enemies defences.”  
“You never let me have anything, Mom”  
“Please do not refer to me as your mother, and focus. We’ve come too far to fail now.”  
“Oh please tell us, Captain, how we are meant to get past this fucking blockade. They already know we are here they’re just waiting for us to fuck up. They don’t even have to come get us.”  
“Doi,” the Regenrator butted in and they all stared at them.  
“Doi what?”  
“I’m you’re human meat shield remember? I take bullets for you, I take torture for you. All that jazz.” They rose unsteadily and stood above them.  
“When did you grow your feet back!?”  
“Oh ages ago. I just liked being carried like a blushing bride.”  
“You little shit.”  
The Regenerator started rubbing their eyes with the heels of their hands. “This little shit’s about to save your whiny asses.” They brought their hands away and blinked as their newly formed eyes took in the low light.  
“Hey wai-“  
“What?” they glared down at the Captain, like they were daring him to say a word.  
The Captain opened his mouth to retort but they already had stepped out and started walking. He started to feel like he had lost a bit of respect from his team, and he had to brush off his sulking and force himself to peer over the wall with the rest of them.  
The Regenerator was hit immediately by a pepper of bullets, stumbling from the impacts, generating, walking again. Broken wrinkled bullets dropped to the ground as they swelled out of the wounds in the Regenerators chest, who stepped over them towards the increasingly panicked guardsmen. Both swung their Gatling guns towards them and filling their body with lead. The Regenerator stood stock still, spreading their arms and absorbing every shell. The bullets bit and tore chunks of flesh that regrew instantly. The police spotted the Regenerator’s spine and ribs being blasted to nothingness over and over, peppering metal and meat everywhere, spinning up dirt and dust into the air around them. The fear that was growing on the faces of the guards spun something sickening in the Captain’s belly. The bullets were running out, and with a final whir and click, they were truly left weapon-less. The dust parted in the gentle breeze and the Regenerator was gone, just a shape darting towards the barricades. They didn’t stumble anymore. Didn’t hesitate in leaping the balustrade and sinking their fingers into the necks of the guards, curling them up into their skulls, seizing their weapons, running knives across necks, flinging away and finding homes in flesh, limbs pulled apart and broken. Screams arose and faded away one by one, the sounds of bullets firing dying away in the dust filling the air.  
The squad stopped watching eventually. Macaulay looked slightly sickened.  
The final yelps died away and all that was left was the wind.


End file.
